mirjana batinic | fiction and loss

Fiction and Loss is an interactive installation by Mirjana Batinić composed of video and audio noise. It is about distorted perception, subtle layers of life that we often fail to notice, about presence of persons that used to be here in dislocated time, deconstruction and fear, about feelings and beliefs. It’s about what is left behind in an empty gallery and what remains within the mind of a person that has been wiped blank of all knowledge. “Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.” [The Aesthetics of Noise, Torben Sangild]

Eccentric impulses which stimulate people to voluntary submit themselves to dreadful experiences have, throughout history, occupied the great master-minds of horror. Yet they never solved the mystery of the primordial drives that fuel the spectator’s search for tension between the gaze and the image, which is certainly going to be disturbing. The displeasing image serves as a mean of transfer that becomes the object of experience and substitutes the life itself. This installation is not a depiction of reality yet it still causes emotions that can hardly be disregarded as an illusion. On the contrary, the fictional scenes are gradually gaining power over our perception of the real. As the noise turns to silence, the doors are slammed shut by wind. The fictional interpretation becomes more real than the reality itself. The spectators enter the installation of Mirjana Batinić determined by the desire to encounter the object. We are longing for mental stimulus that would exceed the emotional and mental intensity of daily life. Nothing notable happens in the space, yet the artist surrounds us with suggestive audiovisual fragments that trigger a set of associations initially in accordance with spectator’s current inner state of mind. All of a sudden we are confronted with an image that shatters the relation between the gaze of the object and the gaze of the subject, without allowing for spectator to rationally reflect on the impulse. The desire to be convinced of the image’s existence remains unfulfilled, there is no possibility for the disclosure of the imaginative and assigning the attributes of the known, thus the longing becomes so strong that it causes the aversion from reality and preserves the object in a form of hallucination. No resolution occurs, neither there is catharsis; the expected object of viewing dissolves completely and what remains is our perception overshadowed with a rather unpleasant residue.

Mirjana Batinić is a multimedia artist, born 1977 in Split, Croatia. Currently finishing postgraduate studies at department of Video and New Media at Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was a postgraduate researcher at department of Media and Communications at University in Klagenfurt, Austria. Graduated 2003 at Arts academy of University in Split, Croatia. Finished School of Fine Arts in Split in 1996. Won several awards and school grants. She is engaged in video art, new media, graphic design, drawing, photography and writing. She gave several public lectures and presentations and participated at numerous workshops, exhibitions and festivals of video and electronic art. This is her thirteenth solo exhibition and third in Slovenia.